One more time: thumb-sucking still not a big deal

Family psychologist John Rosemond answers parents’ questions at www.rosemond.com.

Published: September 1, 2013;Last modified: December 8, 2016 03:41PM

In a recent column, I said thumb-sucking is not, as was once thought, a sign of insecurity or other psychological problems. Well-adjusted children suck their thumbs and grow up to be well-adjusted adults.

My daughter, who began sucking her thumb minutes after she was born (I think she used it to pass the time in utero), occasionally sucked her thumb to get to sleep when she was in high school. One time, when she was home from college, I checked on her around midnight and there she was, fast asleep with her favorite digit in her mouth. Today, Amy is a happily married homemaker with three children. She no longer sucks her thumb. She hasn’t the time.

I much prefer children sucking their thumbs to pacifiers, which have been shown to interfere with speech development as well as the ability to self-comfort. Thumbs have never been associated with speech problems, and they are an ideal form of self-comforting.

Fathers are prone to having a peculiar anxiety reaction when their sons suck their thumbs. I suppose they think this is the straight path to effeminacy, or becoming a momma’s boy, or something equally unmanly. No statistics exist on the number of SEALs or SWAT team members who sucked their thumbs as children, but I would venture to guess the percentage approximates that of the general population. Occasionally, I run into folks who tell me that hot sauce or mittens or dental appliances persuaded their kids to stop sucking their thumbs, but I meet a whole lot more parents who tell me that stuff didn’t work. We tried a dental appliance for a few weeks on Amy when she was a preschooler. She simply adjusted the position of her thumb to avoid the poisoned spikes and went right on sucking.